Nicholas Bell

I've seen something like this with other AI planes doing this using F6 - they normally land way short of the airfield, but eventually "drive" to runway. I realize this doesn't help you solve your problem... Is this with a stock aircraft on a stock map?

The other evening I was flying a D7 and had a Brisfit easily turn inside me and riddle me. I know they were good planes and well-liked by their pilots, but where they that manueverable? They are "fun" to fly, and the gunner is good to have. The cockpit and gunsight work well with the TIR4 - I have to hunch down to look through the sight just as I imagine the pilot might.

Including the H "Hog" I hope (didn't see it listed)

You can: EJECT=SHIFT+ESCAPE I've become quite efficient at quickly hitting these keys

Maybe it's a bug, or maybe it's an interesting feature. Vasily Popkov was shot down on October 29th bravely defending my tail. He shot down an F-100 firing at me, and then was immediately hit by a Sidewinder from first plane's wingman. Popkov was listed as MIA, lost over Fulda. Vasily showed up on the unit roster a few days later on November 3rd, healthy but feeling a bit demoralized. After a few more days rest he was up to snuff and back on ops. Maybe he was not meant to be a fighter pilot, as his plane was battered by 20mm hits from an F-86K and he was shot down again near Celle. For him the war is over, this time listed as a POW.

Now if someone were only working on a Bear model.....

Veltro- Looking forward to your Vucan! Will be a great addition for campaigns (at least mine anyway!)

Thanks, Peter. Will give them a spin in the next week.

Peter, I'd say stick with your original plan and wait until TK releases the next patch. There's plenty of planes awaiting your magic touch regarding AI and basic FM behavior. As far as SF1/WOV/WOE, stalls don't occur as I would expect and experience in other prop sims. FastCargo's post indicates that this may be accurate. For example, pulling max Gs in a vertical bank with a F-100 will rapidly cause the loss of airspeed, turn rate and some altitude. There is a rumbling noise indicating a stall, but there is no nose or wing drop. The plane remains stable but the controls are unresponsive until enough airspeed is regained. Letting off on the stick pressure is usually enough. Going to full afterburner does not help much quickly. Unless highly modified, aircraft do not spin either. I've seen some 3rd party prop aircraft with bizarre stall and spin behavior. Nick

Anyone else seeing odd behavior of the Alb DVa? Something I've never seen before. Shot both the top and bottom right wings off and the plane flew circles at speed of 5-20 mph and descending slowly? At times this contraption was also climbing at 10 mph. Some component have too much lift or not enough drag? Or is this some aberration in the program that I just have not seen?

Unfortunately not. A while back I requested on the Third Wire Forum that TK add a simple text dump of the mission log in the next patch, but no reply. So to help me track my current campaign I'm capturing screenshots of the mission results.

Peter, I fully understand and appreciate where you are coming from. Please don't crash and burn on us all before you get around to it though! A break may be in order given your description of how much time you've spent on this. While I think it wonderful you are doing the hard work to so greatly enhance this sim, I also don't want you to burn out and drop out. Thanks again - your talent and time spent are appreciated!

Thanks, Peter! I hope to be able to give them a spin later this week. You've done some great work on the other planes! Any chance you might be willing to post some definitions and effects of the various AI parameters so we can learn from your experience?

The DESTROYED tag tells the program how to handle the aircraft once that system or component total hit point value (calculated by the volume of the hit boxes determine by min/max extents & modified by StructuralFactor and VolumeStructurePoint). You can change it to DISABLED, HEAVY DAMAGE, or DAMAGE IIRC. These impact the effect of the loss of the component/system affects other nearby components/systems too. With anything other than DESTROYED, the AI will continue to attempt to fly the aircraft. This is not always a good thing, especially with the engine, as the AI will attempt to climb and engage once it builds up speed. Of course this doesn't work so it dives again and repeats the process. Pretty silly looking IMO. Now only if they could attempt a belly-landing.... CoolHand29's post is a copy of a post I wrote over at SimHQ which outlines the many different ways you can toughen up aircraft. Using the mods I mention in that post, it took 5 30mm hits on an F-100 to bring it down. A couple hit the wing and one stabilizer with one shot. The next shot I took hit the fuselage 3 times and that KO'ed the Hun. It did not burn. It took 139 rounds in 4 bursts to achieve this - obviously I'm not the best shot. But without the damage modifications that Hun probably would have died with the first hit. I realize that not all will agree with this - thinking it too strong, but I have many cases still where one shot destroys a plane. It just doesn't happen as frequently.

I stand corrected. Thanks for the movie - it doesn't look like a recoverable spin. Maybe it shouldn't be in the example shown. Guess lowering the gear didn't help.. Too bad it's not easy to do. Would be nice to have accelerated stalls and spins. Will make do, though with what we have.

Since I'm proven myself pretty blind in the past, I thought I better ask if anyone knows of an F-86H add-on. Of course I can fake it, but the plane is visibly more "burly" than it's younger siblings - excepting the Dog of course! Thanks...

The tutorial should explain it all: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autom...p;showfile=2679

That's interesting, Nele. Will have to try that out. From what I understand spinning wasn't introduced into the flight engine until First Eagles, but maybe that's incorrect information? Would be nice to retrofit your "problem" into other aircraft. And thanks again for another interesting lesson on Soviet aircraft.

You can always use ALT-C to change the time of day so you can at least see better.

What would be nice is the straight edge rudder rather than the D V tail.

Good idea!

This joke has been around for many years. At least that is my professional opinion as a former Air Defense Artillery officer in an IHAWK unit. Iran is well known for these kind of propaganda stunts. There is nothing to gained by using the HAWK missile over the AIM-7 on the other Tomcat in the photo.

My WOE Air Defense Mod adds the HAWK Belt to Germany. http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autom...p;showfile=4714

I thought so too until I tried it... The problem is that vehicles modified to be used by the player blow up when moving across the ground because of the collision routines. And where you need collision routines (like vehicles running into buildings or trees) there are none. Whether intentional or not (he has mentioned wanting to do land-based wargames) TK has made it pretty tough to do a totally new game.

The problem isn't offensive AI routines as much as the near non-existent defensive AI. You all know that the AI takes no action against SAMS, and that any plane on any strike mission simply flies the waypoints, bombs and flies back home, ignoring all threats. You can shoot them down like pigeons. Heck, I've flown in front of them to see if I could evoke a response. None, no matter what the pilot rating. I've even eliminated all blind zones just to check if that was the problem. It really irks the cr@p out of me to see friendlies with AIM-9s on the pylons getting slaughtered just because they had a bombing waypoint. Even the offensive AI fails when the target is armed with any sort of tail guns, as it merely attacks from the rear and gets nailed. You cannot defend the failure of the AI routines here. As a pure fighter vs fighter sim, the AI is pretty realistic. But that is rather ironic given the series theme is "strike fighters". Hopefully TK will address this in the next patch.